band one-shots

i fucking hate the aftertaste || kellic

i have no idea what this is but it was lowkey kinda based off a match into water (hence the title—)

ship: kellin quinn x vic fuentes

~

It always comes back to Kellin.

Vic can smell him. His clothes are drenched in the boy's cologne; that and a mix of his sweat. More than that, it's in his hair too. Even underneath his fingernails, ensnared in the grime and dirt. It's branded into his skin, deep within the layers of the dermis, and God, he doesn't think that he will ever be able to truly dig it all out.

Maybe he shouldn't dig it out; perhaps this is where Kellin has made his new home, dug his roots. God knows Kellin is never coming back to their physical home, so Vic should let him rest here. Let the dead bury themselves where their secrets lie. In their secret.

Kellin was always a secret.

The kind that die in the back of your throat, never even make it to the tip of your tongue, because you cannot speak of it, not because you would be punished if you did so, but because you do not know how to. The words collect in your lungs, clump together and block oxygen; all you can breathe is smoke. But they are there, and they rise up, and you try to choke them out, purge it all away, just for them to dissipate. You are left to explain why the fuck your fingers are down your throat and you don't know how to say that your explanation is that you were searching for a deeper explanation.

There is no explanation— isn't that the fucking beauty of it all? Things happen and you cannot stop them, can't explain their purpose; you will never know the intricacies of the universe, and it fucking sucks.

That's what Vic thinks about as he sits in the grass.

The grass is cold beneath him and he thinks that maybe he has seeped into the ground, because he feels so numb and cold that it cannot possibly all be contained inside him. There is too much inside of him. There is Kellin and there is anger, there is sadness, there is fear, there is even a deep guilt that laces the edges of his consciousness. Worse than all of that is the numbness. The absolute fucking nothing he feels, that coats everything else until it's all a dull blur of Kellin.

"I hate you." He chokes out, and the words prick at him like needles coming up his throat. He creates more though, because the needles are a blistering heat that warms his insides, and as long as they stab he is no longer numb. "I hate your eyes. I hate the way that you would look at me with them, like I was the only person you'd ever seen in your life, and I hate that I probably fucking was, because you didn't see anyone like you saw me.

"I hate our first date because you were wearing a Nirvana hoodie and you gave it to me because I was cold, and I still sleep with it on, even when it's a hundred degrees outside. I hate our seventeenth date because that was when I realized I was in love with you, and I also hate our ninth date because that's when you fell in love with me.

"I hate our second date too, and all the ones in between that and our two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth one.

"I counted." Vic has to take a breath and he counts that as well, thirty seconds of breathing until his lungs feel like his own again and tears aren't in immediate danger of streaking down his cheeks.

"Maybe I'm a little off, because a lot of them blurred together and it kind of became one big long one sometimes, because I would never leave your side, but that's how many I counted.

"I hate that you fell in love with me, and I hate that I had to go and fall in love with you too."

He tries to take another breath, only this one takes longer than the first. Air bites at his lungs; all it does is irritate them, it doesn't soak in, and it takes a few gasps for him to realize he's choking on his own sobs.

The grass bites at his ankles. He reaches out to touch cold stone, and his hands do fuck all to warm it, the cold instead seeping in. The thing is, he's already cold, fucking full of it to the brim, and he sobs harder.

"I hate that you're fucking dead. And I fucking hate that I'm not."

~

i !!! feel !!!! like !!!!! shit !!!!